Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic caused lifestyle changes and has led to the new electricity demand patterns in the presence of non-pharmaceutical interventions such as work-from-home policy and lockdown. Quantifying the effect on electricity demand is critical for future electricity market planning yet challenging in the context of limited smart metered buildings, which leads to limited understanding of the temporal and spatial variations in building energy use. This study uses a large scale private smart meter electricity demand data from the City of Austin, combined with publicly available environmental data, and develops an ensemble regression model for long term daily electricity demand prediction. using 15-min resolution data from over 400,000 smart meters from 2018 to 2020 aggregated by building type and zip code, our proposed model precisely formalizes the counterfactual universe in the without COVID-19 scenario. the model is used to understand building electricity demand changes during the pandemic and to identify relationships between such changes and socioeconomic patterns. Results indicate the increase in residential usage, demonstrating the spatial redistribution of energy consumption during the work-from-home period. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework by assessing multiple socioeconomic impacts with the comparison between the counterfactual universe and observations.

Department(s)

Biological Sciences

Publication Status

Open Access

Keywords and Phrases

Building energy performance simulation; COVID-19; Data synthesizer; Ensemble model; Machine learning; Socioeconomic factors

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

2730-6852

Document Type

Article - Journal

Document Version

Citation

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 2025 Springer, All rights reserved.

Publication Date

01 Dec 2023

Included in

Biology Commons

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